Only 19 out of 482 cities in California protect tenants against rent hikes and arbitrary evictions. That means most of California’s tenants can be evicted for no reason at all, and can have their rents raised by any amount their landlord wants.

That’s why tenants are rising up across the state to win Rent Control for All!Learn about the 18 cities in California that have protections for tenants!

Urban Green Investments is a real estate investment company based out of San Francisco, and directly responsible for numerous evictions. This map, by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, details Urban Green's chain of financialization and speculation, directly linking to the Republican Party, and tied up with shell investment companies across the country. Urban Green is run by David McCloskey, and his father, Thomas McCloskey, who owns dozens of other companies from Colorado to Florida.

From the Report by Tenants Together: “This data is a significant addition to national data released earlier this year. Researchers at Eviction Lab, a project led by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, identified 43,000 evictions in California last year. However, due to the masking of unlawful detainer records from public view in California, the full spectrum of eviction data is unavailable using standard research tools. Eviction Lab noted the limits on its California research when it released the national data and the need for further research.”

In this article, we trace the emergence of the false YIMBY/NIMBY dialectic now dominant in Bay Area housing justice discourse, studying its constitution and material effects. Specifically, we investigate how racial capitalism is constitutive of YIMBYism, drawing upon Cedric Robinson’s argument that racialization has always been constitutive of capitalism, and racism is requisite for capitalism’s endurance. We make our argument by drawing upon empirical research conducted by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a data analysis, oral history, and critical cartography collective of which we are both a part. We also draw upon collaborative research between AEMP and community-based housing rights nonprofits and local housing justice organizing efforts, as well as literary and cultural analysis. Such a methodological approach facilitates the unearthing of the racial logics undergirding YIMBYism, pointing to the need for alternative analytics to theorize and mobilize against heightened forms of racialized dispossession. We begin by outlining San Francisco’s YIMBY and NIMBY genealogies, and then proceed to unravel the basic statistical logic underpinning YIMBYism. In doing so, we introduce an additional analytic that we argue is requisite for deconstructing YIMBY algorithms: aesthetic desires of wealthy newcomers. In doing so, we suggest that the YIMBY “build, baby, build” housing solution fails when architectural and neighborhood fantasies are taken into account. We then study now racialized surveillance informs not only the NIMBY but also the YIMBY gaze, arguing that both camps are ultimately tethered to racial capitalism’s liberal legacies.